comic foundry

May 15, 2007

One of the coolest comics magazines to roll out in years, looks to be facing a serious uphill climb. Tim Leong's Comic Foundry kicks ass, plain and simple. This is an open letter to Tim Huckelberry, of Diamond Comics. Diamond has rejected Comic Foundry for distribution through their Previews catalog.

Hi Tim,

Just a quick, friendly note to let you know that, for whatever it may be worth, i think Tim Leong's Comic Foundry is an excellent magazine, that really deserves a chance at finding an audience. Besides that there's just too few good comics magazines in circulation as it is (and the more magazines there are, the more medium gets talked up, the better the sales of comics, which is goof for for all of us), i feel that Comic Foundry is the only contemporary comics magazine that successfully rides the middle-ground between the elitism of magazines like the Comics Journal and Comic Art, and the entrenched fanboy mags like Wizard, or even our own Comic Book Artist. (All of which i personally love, and devour with equal glee.)

Tim's content and design feel more to me like a "real-world" magazine, with sharp, staccato content mixed with a handful of lengthier articles and interviews, ala Wired magazine. And his editorial tastes are superb. This is the ONLY magazine on comics that i feel would appeal to the nascent populist comics readers, new to the medium. They might buy the magazine at a Border's and then pick up a graphic novel there as well. But if and when said reader evolves into a passionate fan, they will eventually find their way to a full-service comics shop (one supplied by Diamond), where the product selection is far-superior than a chain bookseller.

In fact, i'm such a fan of this magazine, that Top Shelf actually gave serious consideration to publishing it. In the end, the main thing holding us back, was our commitment to Jon Cooke's Comic Book Artist, and we felt we couldn't give to the proper support to two mags at once.

Comic Foundry, i think, fills a much-needed niche: a magazine that reaches out to new fans, and is neither too snooty and a turn-off, nor too entrenched in old-school, hard-core, fan-boy mythology, overloaded with confusing continuity. One with the perfect balance of mainstream (by comics' terminology), and indy sensibilities, in a gorgeously designed package. The perfect mag to root out the single most important niche that comics needs now more than ever... NEW READERS.

Comic Foundry makes good business sense for the health of the marketplace, please reconsider listing it in Previews.